The title of her talk will be “Reconstructing circuits — the power of random.” The event is free and open to members of the Stanford community. A reception will follow. The deadline to register is 7 p.m. Jan. 31.

A professor of biology at MIT, Regev is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, director of Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad Institute and chair of the Broad Institute’s faculty.

Regev and her colleagues develop experimental and computational approaches to decipher the mechanisms that underlie the transcriptional regulatory circuits in organisms ranging from yeast to humans. Members of her lab study how these transcriptional circuits change on a variety of timescales, from hours to millions of years. These studies yield detailed reconstructions and highlight key principles that govern the emergence of novel functions in gene regulation.

The lectureship is named for Katharine Dexter McCormick, a biologist and feminist who left a large bequest to Stanford with the hope that it would be used “in aid of women students attending the School of Medicine and more generally for the encouragement and assistance of women in pursuing the study of medicine, in teaching medicine and engaging in medical research.”